


south of the sun, west of the sea

by kandeya



Category: Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kandeya/pseuds/kandeya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>snippets of two rather extraordinary lives</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He remembers, buried in the remnants of every other memory -- *Ayesha*, and won't her name leave him? -- the feel of small fingers grasping his own slightly sweaty hand as he walked down the stairs, the unsteady step of feet in shoes hastily and badly laced pulling him slightly backwards. He doesn't recall a voice, just remembers the confusion that soaked the air between them.

Those hands were so tiny, curling nervously into his palm as they finally reached the door.

"Remember," his traitorous voice echoes in his skull, *even now*, "*you're* Hershel." Doubt spreads across the small face, and then...

"We are approaching Misthallery, sir." Raymond's voice cuts through him, cuts down to his bone and shatters his thoughts. Absently, he glances at the maps on the navigation screen.

He is nothing more than shadow now; his name properly belongs to another, his hope has long left him, and all that gives him strength...

Well. Despair has driven him so far, and memory will not keep him imprisoned.

There are still scales to be balanced, blood to be drawn from the oldest of stones.

One day, he will be able to look back, stare into Eurydice's eye with more than wretched hopelessness.

One day, he will be able to say goodbye.

 

* * *

 

 

It's the nightmares that keep you awake, you think, as you creep out the kitchen door for the umpteenth time that week. Ma has started keeping it unlocked, even with her deathly (and seemingly unfounded?) fear of black-uniformed burglars.

(An oddly specific fright, you think, but a puzzle for another time.)

Angela has not left her room for a week, Henry absently reports, his gaze elsewhere, before bowing primly and heading back into the mansion, closing the door with a solid *thunk*, a sound that carries through the empty garden.

Mr. Ascot does not yell at you anymore; the secret way upstairs lies unused.

She has not looked you in the eye since you returned, bloody, dirty, disheveled and *alone*.

Hershel stares at the window -- *Randall's* window -- with its tiny crack from the one time he'd flicked a stone up too hard. His vision blurs, he almost falls to his knees.

Blindly, terrified, he stumbles away from the house -- the house of ghosts looming larger and larger in his mind -- and stumbles towards the meadow and the Norwell wall.

*Away*, he gasps inaudibly, his throat constricting, his breath coming short even as he tugs desperately at his collar, *away from here.*

 

He hates Randall, he thinks. Archaeology and puzzles and all that absolute //tosh//.

His grip was so sure, he was certain. He //could have.//

Should have.

*Randall, just give me your other hand!* His arm aches, phantasmagoric pain shooting through his nerves.

The memory of failure, a memory even his body refuses to let go of.

 

He curls in on himself, his shirt torn, in the meadow's grass, the shadow of the Norwell wall just barely visible in the dim light.

London, he thinks, abruptly.

London, where he will be crushed against anonymous commuters in tube stations and ignored by store keepers and shouted at by hassled coppers.

London, he breathes. He can be forgotten.

 

Randall was selfish. Now it's his turn to be.

Hershel laughs, a sharp short bark of a laugh, and says, in a voice disused for days,

"Goodbye, Randall."

 

* * *

 

When he met her, he was still Desmond, clever Desmond --- half-funny, mostly-serious Desmond, at Oxford in the dying days of a D.Phil. Job offers from Edinburgh, from UCL, and his name bandied about the conferences, with threads of promise. Old men and their trusts fighting each other off to fund his expeditions -- their future glory.

(Last he heard, a certain Bronev had been appointed to the Vinland Institute in Southbank, the premier research institution into prehistoric New World civilizations. Vinland had recently poached his advisor, offering a truly inglorious amount of money old Oxford had no hope of matching. Desmond didn't mourn the old fool.)

She, surprisingly, didn't care for all those sordid tales and doubts. She liked Renoir, she talked for days about *The Human Beast* when they took the train down to London for his final interviews. She taught him to cook a //proper// chicken curry, thank you very much. None of this cheap knockoff pub crap.

(There were reasons Mosinnia moved him, and the smell of saffron and cloves was one of them.)

He thought they might stop by the BFI after the last of them, catch more weird and wonderful films, but instead she took him by the hand, and they took the tube all the way out to East Ham. He was surprised to discover her gran lived here, in a cramped second-floor flat above a busy South Indian restuarant. The gran was delighted to meet Desmond, grasping his proffered hand between her two wrinkled, callused palms, and squeezing tight, as if he were dearly loved.

"Ayesha says you're a big-big professor!"

"Ah," Desmond chuckled, "soon." He doesn't think about Bronev or Vinland for the rest of the night, and instead sings an Azran ballad to Ayesha and her gran as they make naan and dal makhni. They cackle mysteriously at the sibilant sounds, and he doesn't bother to translate, letting the sounds wash over him.

The smell is wonderful. Desmond thinks he's happy.

But then Ayesha grins at him, that grin that lights up her face and puts a crinkle in her eye. It's utterly unromantic, when he thinks about it later; her *gran*'s right there, making falooda -- "better than any damn lassi, dear," Ayesha promises as her gran takes down the bottle of Rooh Afza from its high shelf -- and she simply asks,

"So, let's get married, then?"

Yes, he says, yes I will yes.

She laughs out loud then, *Ulysses* being the book they swapped between them in lieu of letters, notes scrawled thick in the margins.

 

He was sure he had burned every book of Joyce's on the Bostonius before he repaired her, but when he saw the worn green-spined book --- //that// *Ulysses*, //their// *Ulysses* --- on a shelf above the navigation console, he burst into tears.

Raymond placed a cup of tea by his elbow and left to tidy the aft storeroom, noting that there were a few boxes in there he'd like the master to check at his leisure.


	2. Chapter 2

He's all of 19 when he heads to Liverpool, a year behind his schoolmates, but in possession of a varied collection of A-levels and a razor-sharp intellect. *Too sharp*, his mother would sometimes cheerfully warn him, grasping his shoulder with a flour-caked hand.

He goes for a degree in archaeology, with a minor in sociology. People, ancient and modern, are the real puzzle, he decides. He doesn't think of Randall often these days, three and some odd years into his penance, though sometimes he still *feels* it, a phantom grip against his own fingers, the clear certainty in Randall's eye becoming his own, slowly.

Angela once said, while the three of them sucked on sticks of rock and threw crumbs of bread at the ducks in the pond outside the village, that Randall and him were //perfect inversions//. It sounded like a smart thing to say; Randall snorted and punched her lightly in the shoulder after, and Hershel, indifferent, gazed into the blue-green depths of the water, trying to make out the tiny splashes of frogs leaping for the sun.

 

* * *

 

His left hand gives the barest of sympathetic twitches as he carefully dusts off the sherds from the summer field expedition; he's been given the unenviable task of preparing the samples for seminar next week.

One civilization's garbage -- literal garbage, it was an old kitchen midden they were combing through that summer, his professor says with a cheerful grin -- another civilization's last link to times gone by.

It would be fascinating, were it not so very sad. What towers they might have built to pierce the veils of sky and cloud, what songs they might have sung to their children on warm nights by the fire. None of this is left, or if it's left, they've certainly not learned about it yet.

Lives, he thinks, and all that's left is garbage. He's bitter that *this* had to be what Randall loved -- and so it will be what he loves, because that much of Randall must remain in the world, and that much, he will do. Angela stopped writing him months ago, and it is left to him to try and remember them both in his solitude.

He's careful with the brush, and remembers delicate hair blown back by the wind, enthused laughter echoing in his ear.

 

* * *

 

He's 18 when he casts off his brother's name, his father's despair. //Theodore// would have been a good name, in another life, but //Bronev// turns to ash in his mouth. A train ticket to Aberdeen, a seat at university that he doesn't know he wants to take and a scholarship he will inevitably claim. He wanted to run, more than anything, after Hershel left him (*he's Hershel now*, he keeps telling himself, and hopes the name has served him well) and he had nothing but a village that didn't know what to do with him and a burning energy to get back all that was denied him.

Somehow he survived, though it's a haze, buried under the memories of tracking his father's captors, wondering what became of his mum. He doesn't believe in curses, really, though the sleepless nights poring over the remains of his father's journals and notes have made him wonder if Bronev men weren't born with a particularly grating sense of stubborness. He tracked his father, finally, to London, and there realized the magnitude of his betrayal.

The name is strange on his tongue: //Targent// //tangent// //tangere, noli me tangere//. He closes his eyes, leans back against the hard train seat, his fingers folding the slip of paper with his father's address on it into precise squares, then triangles.

The purpling bruise lining his jaw, which the passenger across from him gawks at in a fearful admiration, was price enough for his knowledge.

He doesn't know what he should //do// with this, though, and term starts in two weeks. (So you run?, says a voice is not terribly unlike the young Theodore's.)

The glare of the platform's bright lights, refracted a hundredfold in the window, is suddenly unbearable, even against his closed lids.

//Yes,// he gripes at the ghost-Theodore, //yes, I run.// Away from you, away from all of this. He crumples the paper in his fist.

//But Hershel...// and for a minute he is confused at this, at his brother's ghost, and he clenches his teeth, setting off a spasm of pain in his jaw. //Don't you remember, *you're* Hershel.//

 

* * *

 

 

The train makes its slow pull out of Euston, and he cracks an eye open to look at the passenger across from him, whose still looking at him curiously.

"Can I help you?" Theodore grouses.

"Ah! I was wondering whether you were awake, you looked quite distressed. Forgive me, my name is Desmond. I'm a writer, you see, from the West Indies. From Trinidad."

Theodore inclines his head; the only thing he knows of the West Indies, besides the possible location of an Azran city lost to the sea, were ferocious pacemen, perfume balls, and almost-broken noses.

(He does not -- and never will -- regret choosing cricket over football. A gentleman needs his tea break, after all.)

He grins. "Well, I might have a few questions for you."


End file.
